Use of biometrics to authenticate individuals is becoming more commonplace. Voice recognition in particular is increasing in popularity due to its accuracy, ease of use, and low power requirements. Many electronics manufacturers are now pushing voice recognition into smaller and lower power products such as mobile and wearable devices. Likewise, many other authentication techniques are also making their way to consumer electronics, including but not limited to face, iris, gesture and even gait recognition. Similarly, many of the same technologies are also used for control mechanisms, especially the use of voice to command various services such as multimedia, lighting and environmental systems such as that used within the “smart home”.
As more mobile devices are used to perform services such as home automation and authentication, a chief problem arises: How is the performance of recognition maintained across multiple devices? This problem is exacerbated when considering disconnected recognition, where authentication services such as voice and/or sound recognition, for example, are performed without reach-back to common services or cloud computing services.
Devices may have one or more sensor subassemblies such as microphone subassemblies for example. Each microphone subassembly may have one or more microphones, filter extraction, filter/gain stages and A/D (analog-to-digital) characteristics that affect the sensitivity and performance of sound and voice recognition. Thus, the same algorithm and/or models may or may not perform as well across multiple devices.
Existing innovation in the field of the present invention predominantly involves leveraging multiple microphones on the same device to help filter noise and improve signal processing. Published US patent application US2011/0054891 is an example of a plurality of microphones used on a multi-microphone device to reduce and filter noise. Commercial devices such as the Blackberry Z30, for instance, include two or more microphones for the specific purpose of noise cancelation.
Other relevant references include telephony services such as over-the-phone bill pay that may utilize speaker recognition for verification purposes. U.S. Pat. No. 6,766,295 describes a method to adapt a speech model over several remote recognition sessions assuming the use of different microphones for each session.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,219,645 describes an automatic speech recognition system that utilizes a central processing controller to choose from a plurality of microphones, using the microphone with the best signal to perform speech recognition. More recently, the Amazon Echo is an example of one device that recognizes voice commands to perform various controls such as select music and change lighting.